Blog

Zachman International

In the Information Age, the characteristics we understand to date are complexity and change. The customer wants a product specific to his or her specification... a custom product. The customer is a market of one. And, the customer may not even know what they want until they want it and then they want it now... immediately. And, if you can’t produce to those requirements, click! They get a new supplier. Once again, It is a global market and very easy to switch suppliers.

The question is, what is your strategy to accommodate orders of magnitude increases in complexity and orders of magnitude increases in the rate of change? And, this is not an IT issue. The question Chief, is not whether this is happening or not... it IS happening. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

My goodness! I'm so sorry to take so long with another blog! I'll bet this year is the most people we have Zachman Certified ever! HUNDREDS of folks this year so far!

Alright let me continue this disccusion:

If you REALLY want to reduce the time it takes from when you discover you need a new system until it is operational:

If you wait until you get the order before you begin to engineer and manufacture, you an only reduce the time-to-market by reducing size/ complexity of the product. Reduce size, scope. Simplify. Proliferate legacy problems. Build smaller parts that don’t fit together in higher volumes.

If you want to buy rather then build and someone has created an inventory of standard products, you can reduce the time-to-market to virtually zero as long as you change the use of the product to fit the product. Packages. COTS. Implement as is. Change the Enterprise to fit the package. (Don’t change the package to fit the Enterprise!)

If you have prefabricated parts that are designed to be assembled into more than one product, you can reduce the time-to-market to just the time it takes to pick the parts and assemble them to order... virtually zero. What do you think had to be in inventory to assemble Enterprises to order?... Enterprise Architecture.

The challenge is not technical... it is cultural. The culture at one of end of the strategy spectrum is diametrically opposed to the culture at the other end. I have included Figure 4 which depict some of the cultural characteristics at either end of the Strategy spectrum.

My goodness! Cort and I have been teaching non-stop! We have Zachman Certified just over 65 people in the last month!

OK, on with this blog...

Clearly, you have to change the strategy... to an Assemble-to-Order strategy... Mass-Customization, “custom products, mass-produced in quantities of one for immediate delivery”... but this is a completely different kind of a business. You have to have PARTS in inventory... NOT finished goods... and those parts have to be engineered such that they can be assembled into more than one product. How do you engineer parts that can be assembled into more than one thing? You have to know the total set of things you have to assemble at any given point in time. You do the engineering Enterprise-wide. After you engineer the parts to assemble the Enterprise set of products, you can pre-fabricate the parts and have them in inventory before you get the order. Then when you get the order, the only time it takes to produce the custom product is the time it takes to map the specifications of the product in the order to the inventory of parts, pick the parts and assemble the custom product to order.

Initially, the customer is willing to accept these limitations... they don’t know any better. But, over long periods of time, 50 or a hundred years, they get frustrated and the drive the manufacturer out of a Job Shop into a Standard Production Environment (mass production) in order to solve the problems. Actually, the problem is the strategy. As long as the strategy is make-to-order... those are the problems. If you want to solve those problems, you have to change the strategy. Provide-from-Stock. Manufacture standard products to inventory before you ever get an order and then when you get an order, deliver the standard product off the shelf. That will fix some of, but not all of, the problems.

WOW! We have been Zachman Certifying so many people these last 2 months, I feel like I have been on the road non-stop! Sorry to take so long with this next part of the blog!

Go back to the Toyota illustration... I want to develop a pattern, a Strategy Pattern, for you. I am sure it is a universal pattern. I use Manufacturing, tangible products, because they are easier to conceptualize than intangible products like services but I am sure this is a universal pattern. We live in buildings, fly in airplanes, ride in automobiles and type or touch computers. They represent the reality around us that we can physically sense and easily conceptualize.

Back to the Toyota illustration... now that Toyota has all these parts engineered to be assembled into any Toyota and have pre-fabricated them and have them in inventory before they get any orders... how does Toyota “cost-justify” those parts? They don’t have any orders so there is no revenue. They are not making any money... they are not saving any money in the current accounting period.

I'd like to put some posts together about what I think "The New Paradigm" for Enterprise Architecture is. I will break this up into 5 or 6 blogs that deal with this in terms of Enterprise Architecture expenses vs. assets, cost justification of Enterprise Architecture, providing from stock vs assemble-to-order strategies, mass-customization of EA and some cultural implications of this new paradigm.

That said, I need to set some context for you. I usually use the Toyota illustration to make the New Paradigm point:

A few years ago, Toyota announced in North America that if you give Toyota the specifications for the automobile you want to take delivery on, they will deliver your automobile, custom to your specifications, in 5 days! Five days is not zero, but it is pretty close to zero as those automobiles these days are pretty complex. When I grew up, I worked on my own car... but when you opened the hood, all that was in there was a four cylinder block and a carburetor. Today, I will buy a car and drive it until either it or I die... and never open the hood! There is so much stuff in there that I can’t even find the dip stick anymore! I can’t even change my own oil!

As I've thought more about the Powershift, let me give you some evidence about how powershift happens in real life.

I did a lot of work with the CEO of a large retail department store... this company was like Walmart... it was not Walmart but it was like Walmart... and the CEO would say, “the customer is a market of one.” I could never “get it.” The customer is a market of one... in a retail store??? But... think about it... the retail store knows a lot about you... they give you points or special promotional deals to gather data about you. They know who you are, they know your phone number, your address, how many times a week you visit the store, how much you spend, probably how much you make, they know what you buy, what combinations of products you buy... they have a lot of “big data”... they have so much big data that they probably don’t even know what to do with all of it... yet.

In the third blog of three about "The Information Age," the third book Toffler wrote about change was “Powershift." The basic idea in this book is, if you give everyone the same information at the same time, the power will shift outboard. No longer will the power be concentrated in two or three people at the top who know everything, decide everything, control everything... the power will shift outboard. In fact, if the customer, the recipient of the product or service of the Enterprise has access to the same information that the Enterprise has access to, the power will shift into the external environment ... to the customer. It will become “market driven”! Those of us that come from the Information Community see all kinds of evidence of this over the last 15 or 20 years... all kinds of activity around Data Warehouse, most of it centered around customer. We don’t know much about the customer... we know lots about the products or services but little about customer.

The Information Age

Here is a little context around the Information Age. In the interest of time and space, I will try to be brief but there is a key point I have to make. Having made this observation, I will limit my comments about the Information Age to some well-known works by Alvin Toffler, and I will probably break this blog into three separate parts based on the following, so look for those shortly:

"Future Shock" (1970) - The rate of change.

"The Third Wave" (1980) - The structure of change.

"Powershift" (1990) - The culture of change.

-Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler is a well-known name, certainly in the academic community. He is a sociological prognosticator, a futurist, and has written a lot of books. The ones that I refer to above are the ones he wrote that have to do with change.

So, why is it that an Enterprise needs Information Technology people in their Enterprise in the Information Age?

When I happen to be talking to some IT folks and I raise the question, “Why does the Enterprise need Information Technology people in their Enterprise in the Information Age?” I usually warn them at this point that I haven’t had an hour and a half or so to soften them up and I am going to make a radical comment... so don’t fall of their chairs when I say this but...

There presently appears to be a gross misunderstanding about Enterprise Architecture among management... but also among the information community as well. Enterprise Architecture is NOT an Information Technology issue... it is a Management issue. It is likely perceived to be an Information Technology issue as opposed to a Management issue for two reasons: